​Since I was on the subject of Peter Levenda yesterday, I thought I would take a moment to remind everyone that Levenda has placed a lot of weight on what he claims to be his surprising and new approach to the ancient astronaut theory. Specifically, in their recent Rolling Stone interview, Levenda’s coauthor Tom DeLonge emphasized that his discussion of human religion as a sort of cargo cult inspired by space aliens is a quantum leap forward in understanding space alien interaction with humans. As I pointed out in my review of their book Sekret Machines: Gods, this claim is not new or even special; it was first used in the 1970s in the TV movie In Search of Ancient Astronauts.

​However, I was intrigued to see that the late Vine Deloria offered a nearly identical argument in one of his books, Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths (2002), and its parallels to Levenda’s are rather striking. He starts by describing cargo cults and space aliens:

Western religion may simply be the historical remnants of an ancient cargo cult. I do not believe the ancient astronaut thesis, contrary to what I’m sure many reviewers will insist. Following Occam’s razor, however, I am forced to admit that it ties up a lot of loose strings. I do believe that it has much to tell us and should be a topic for serious historical investigation rather simply the concern of flying saucer groups.

​Regular readers know that I don’t think much of Deloria’s frequent forays into hyper-diffusionism and other fringe history staples, but I was rather struck to see Levenda’s major claims given quickly but succinctly here. The difference is that Levenda extends the same claim to Buddhism and other Eastern faiths, too.

Obviously, Deloria was simply aping a larger argument that has come and gone many times. After In Search of Ancient Astronauts, Dean J. J. Dunderstadt wrote of the “fascinating phenomenon” known as the cargo cult in 1977 in the Michigan Technic, relating it to ancient astronauts. It is a quite frequent ancient astronaut touchstone.

But what might be interesting is to note that Levenda’s fascination with claiming that modern religions are cargo cults echoes also a claim made by Neil Freer, the futurist and ancient astronaut theorist, a couple of decades ago in his book God Games. He specifically claimed that “religion as we know it is a cargo cult sublimation of the ancient master-slave relationship.” Now what is most important here is that Freer is an acolyte of Zecharia Sitchin, but his argument adds the weight of the master-slave relationship that is missing from the 1970s versions but is ever-present in Levenda’s version, one that goes to great pains to acknowledge and cite Sitchin as a source.

Remember how Levenda said that his book wasn’t trying to provide evidence, but that the whole Sekret Machines project was designed to assume the ancient astronaut theory was true and then work out the philosophical implications of it? Or, as he put it to Rolling Stone: “What we’re saying is, let’s proceed under the assumption that this is real. What does that mean for history, for medicine, for physics, for chemistry, for astronomy? What does it mean for us as humans if we accept that the phenomenon has always been real?”

Guess what Sitchin himself said of Freer in the introduction to God Games: “Neil Freer undertook a different kind of mind-boggling task. If all that I had concluded was true, he said, what does it all mean not to the human race and the planet in general--what does it mean to the individuals, to each one of us?” Hmm. Sounds familiar.

Sitchin also described himself in that introduction as having “an obsession to find out who the Nephilim were,” which seems about right. Those damn Nephilim/Watchers are always hovering over everything, oversized reminders that behind every ancient astronaut claim is someone struggling to make room for religion in scientific world. They also make their dutiful appearance in Sekret Machines.

Like I said yesterday, I think Levenda knows he's using material already put forward by others. Perhaps not the specific claims you're talking about, but what has been accepted into the whole ancient astronaut theory as true.

At some point it seems to stretch the bounds of credulity that Levenda couldn't have known about the dozens or even hundreds of other versions of the same claims.

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Only Me

4/12/2017 11:42:58 am

Exactly. He may not be familiar with anyone outside of Sitchin, but he has to see the repetition, if, he's done as much research as he says.

Americanegro

4/12/2017 02:50:42 pm

Not joining occult societies (they all want him don't you know) is basically a full-time job and doesn't leave much time for research.

Rough Draft

4/12/2017 11:52:00 am

I'm sure this has been discussed to death, but I wonder how the ancient astronaut theorists explain the fact that the aliens haven't been back since Earth's prehistory to spread more religious inspiration and renew the "master-slave relationship"?

I mean, in recent times even the most adamant UFO believers only make claims of flying saucer sightings and the occasional rube abduction for anal probing purposes. What happened to the ambitious alien agenda?

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Clete

4/12/2017 12:09:17 pm

Well, you see what happened, is that the Grey's had an election. After the election was over, the winner convinced them to build a wall in outer space to prevent other species from coming to their planet. They then withdrew, wrapped themselves in a self-satisfied cocoon, and returned to the days of old.

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Clint Knapp

4/12/2017 05:52:44 pm

See the works of Richard C.Hoaglund for the bridge over that gap.

The short of Hoaglund's rambling bad-science quilt is that the aliens were one or many sentient species inhabiting the solar system in the deep past. They went to war and mostly wiped eachother out to the point the only artifacts of their existence are whatever Hoaglund claims to see in pictures of the Moon, Mars, and every blurry space rock picture NASA "leaks" to the public. They either all died out or became modern humans in time.

While Hoaglund doesn't always explicitly state that these are the same Ancient Astronauts of legend, it is generally implied in his attempts to link his imagined structures on Mars to ancient Egyptian themes and his insistence that NASA uses a lot of Egyptian names for spacecraft because they're secretly aware of, honoring, or trying to emulate the solar system spanning (potentially part of a larger Federation of Planets) civilization of yore.

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Shane Sullivan

4/12/2017 06:52:31 pm

All the pieces are coming together now. Egyptian-named spacecraft like Viking, Apollo, Orion, Atlantis, Challenger, Enterprise, and New Horizons, are really a salute to our Roland Emmerich-tinged ancestors!

Clint Knapp

4/13/2017 09:05:47 pm

Exactly. Hoaglund likes to cherry pick the few projects and whatever "symbolism" he can to peg NASA as an Egyptian cult, while ignoring all the distinctly non-Egyptian named projects and craft.

The last I listened to any of his ramblings on Coast to Coast or Midnight in the Desert he was drooling over OSIRIS-REx and making jubilant noises about President Obama's White House Christmas card a couple years ago and the esoteric messages it was meant to convey about Torsion Physics and the secret Egyptian cult he imagines runs the world for mostly-benevolent purposes (Obama himself was declared a sort of Space Jesus chosen by the cult to usher in a New Age- in Hoaglund's theology, anyway).

Bob Jase

4/12/2017 02:29:03 pm

Considering the thousands of different religions known (let alone those forgotten) we must have been visited by different aliens every other weekend way back when.

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Americanegro

4/12/2017 02:44:40 pm

I'm amazed that Sitchin didn't figure out the Nephilim. The Atlanteans brought a number American Indians and their sex apes to Egypt as servants and to teach the Egyptians Atlantean making-a-big-pile-of-stones technology and a few of them wandered away. That's pretty much what Plato said.

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E.P. Grondine

4/12/2017 04:52:55 pm

Hi Jason -

It seems clear that as a general principle, once these writers find out how much money they can make or fame they can get, they take their existing materials and re-work them for the current market of the day.

De Loria did not like Europeans or their religions too much, but I am surprised by that quote.

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Americanegro

4/13/2017 03:27:18 am

So are you the Shawnee guy with all white ancestors? Asking for a friend.

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E.P. Grondine

4/12/2017 05:28:22 pm

PS - Percy Bullchild in his book "The Sun Came Down" predicted the success of "Ancient Aliens".

He emphatically stated twice in it that Europeans are so racist that they would prefer to believe that Ancient Aliens built the structures whose remains are seen toda, than that Native Americans built them.

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Kal

4/12/2017 06:23:47 pm

Inverse Occam's razor, the false stories of aliens being in the past do not mean that the alien stories are true stories now.

The aliens did not shape our history because we sort of made all that up, and we humans shaped our history, and later we humans forgot we did it, and blamed aliens.

Or, there were aliens, but some kind of war happened and they're gone.

Or the war happened and they put up a directive to prevent themselves and their enemies, who they now lord over, from visiting Earth directly. A prime directive like rule might dictate that we are too primitive and should not be interfered with.

The later would suggest though that Earth is somehow special.

The minerals and creatures that make up our solar system might not be so unique elsewhere in the cosmos. Many of these fringe theories are about gold, which is one example, and can be found in a lot of places where there are no people, such as from asteroids or from other uninhabited planets, with special equipment they no doubt would have. Aliens thus do not need to mine our gold.

The vast cost of likely making and populating a faster than light ship to go and visit a planet, such as Earth, would not be economically feasible if only to find slaves to mine stuff. That's silly.

Or the third and most curious idea, we're not special but are watched over by a current alien race that is making sure we're not messed with. This creates a paradox though, why would they care?

Maybe they're progenitor race, but we've no evidence of that.

We really have no evidence of aliens interfering at allin human history. Why would they bother? Still, as a thought experiment, they could. They would have to be motivated by something other than material wealth though. That is not enough.

Dimensional traveling and time traveling future humans might be interested in the old homestead, but not aliens. No evidence of that exists either.

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Jean Stone

4/12/2017 11:22:38 pm

"Many of these fringe theories are about gold, which is one example, and can be found in a lot of places where there are no people, such as from asteroids or from other uninhabited planets"

This has been prevalent in sci-fi for ages (I'm sure someone with in-depth knowledge could pinpoint exactly when it started) and gets back to either the writers not letting reality get in the way of a good story or simply not realizing how mind-bogglingly vast the universe is and how there's no special need to visit the planet inhabited by creatures so primitive they think digital watches are awesome just to get at whatever resource they supposedly need. Though I'm sure that any ancient astronaut type you could ask nowadays would handwave some explanation about why our gold is super-speshul and can't be found elsewhere, then ignore the pesky issue of not being able to prove a bit of it.

"Or the third and most curious idea, we're not special but are watched over by a current alien race that is making sure we're not messed with. This creates a paradox though, why would they care?"

Because of the Protected Planets Treaty and because Thor seems to like Jack O'Neill? xD

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V

4/13/2017 01:55:46 pm

I can think of basically one way in which "material wealth" might be a decent motivation, and that is an interest in trade--not in raw materials, but in finished goods. Those are the things that are likely to be unique to any given species--our art and entertainment and fashion and all those other things that are personally expressive are not likely to be something replicated throughout the university. Instead, each species is likely to have its own unique heritage of art, fashion, and entertainment, and much like humans, may well crave the new and unique.

So maybe all species that are below a certain tech level are left alone not because there's something inherently wrong with "interfering" with a species, but because it's a pragmatic "let it ripen" kind of attitude.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.